Martha’s face shone. “You made all of these?” Mother nodded. Grandmother and Auntie Shakeh’s mouths dropped open in surprise.
Alenush looked into the wardrobe. “Behzad would love this. Here, take these!”
She thrust a few rusted hairpins into my hand and bent over again to reach for the broken leg of the wardrobe. “I wish Behzad were here, he’d know how to fix this.”
I looked over at Martha, who stared at Alenush for a couple of seconds, then turned on her heel and left the room. The rust of the hairpins had rubbed off onto my palm.
My mother usually wore her hair loose over her shoulders. But on Sundays she would gather up her hair on top of her head with dozens of these pins. Each week, before church was even finished, the pins would begin to slip out of her hair and fall to her shoulders. One Sunday afternoon my grandmother came for lunch at our house and pulled a pin out of her bowl of borscht. After that, Mother cut her hair short, once and for all.
Alenush emptied out the chests. “This is mine. This is for Behzad. Whoa, look at this fabric! I’m going to frame it.”
Martha passed silently through the dimly lit rooms.
That afternoon, in the graveyard behind the church, I said to Alenush, “When can your mother and I meet Behzad?”
Martha looked at me. Then she walked away towards the graves with a small brazier of frankincense.
Alenush’s face shone. “Can I invite him over?”
I looked at Martha, who was standing with her back to us.
“Why not?” I said.
Martha made the sign of the cross and kneeled by the first grave she came to.
Behzad said, “I’m only prejudiced against one thing: prejudice!”
Alenush laughed.
Martha said, “Would you like some more ghormeh sabzi?* Of course, it is not as tasty as the Persians’ ghormeh sabzi.”
Behzad said, “Persians? I’m not Persian. I’m a Turk – my father and mother are from Tabriz.”
This made Alenush laugh even harder. “Armenians call all Iranians ‘Persians,’ no matter which part of Iran they’re from.”
I didn’t know what was making me more uncomfortable: Martha’s discomfort or Alenush and Behzad’s lack of discomfort.
I said, “Behzad, do you play ping-pong?”
After lunch, Behzad and I played ping-pong. It had been years since I had played seriously. Even so, I won all three games.
Behzad put his racket down on the table. “I can’t compete with you!”
Alenush laughed. “There are two things that no one can beat my dad at: ping-pong and…”
Behzad brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen onto Alenush’s forehead. They looked at each other and smiled.
Martha asked, “Would you like some Turkish coffee?”
When it was time to go, I kissed my aunt on the cheek. Her face felt stiff, like Grandmother’s cheek the last time I had kissed it as she lay on her enormous bed among the white sheets.
Auntie whispered in my ear, “Edmond, is everything all right? Martha isn’t herself tonight.”
I looked up and met Alenush’s eyes. She was putting on her oversized coat, which reached to her ankles. She thrust her chin out and looked at me defiantly.
I put my hands on my aunt’s shoulders. How frail she was. I said, “Yes, everything’s fine. Martha is just a little tired these days.”
My aunt nodded. “I understand. We’re all a little tired these days.”
Then she straightened my scarf. “Why don’t you go to the North for a few days? You haven’t been back for a long time, no?” And in my mind, I heard Danique’s voice: The textbooks are ready… in the North…we have nobody to bring them to Tehran…
I nodded. “You’re right. It has been a long time.”
The following morning, when Alenush had gone out, Martha came out of the bedroom. I had made her coffee. She drank it and stood up. I stood next to the sink. Martha washed the cups and I dried them.
She said, “Why not? You can bring back the books, and you’ll have a chance to talk to her, too.”
The cup in my hand was certainly dry by now, so why was I still rubbing it with the dishtowel?
“You don’t want to come?” I asked.
She shut off the tap, took off her rubber gloves, and hung them above the sink. Then she turned and looked at me. Just from last night to now, how much thinner she seemed!
She put her hand on my arm. “Edmond, I’m begging you. You have to do something about this.”
My arm hurt where she gripped it. She released me and walked away. At the door of the kitchen she stopped to look at me again and said, “I just can’t bear it.” Her face was as white as the walls of the kitchen.
Alenush and I left for the North that afternoon. When we passed Karaj,* Alenush started to cry. It had been years since I had seen her cry. Even as a child she never cried much. I stopped at a café just at the beginning of the Chalus road. We sat down by the pool outside the café. Her eyes were still red.
She turned the small glass teacup around in its saucer. “You understand, don’t you? You don’t think I’m making a mistake?”
I held out my pack of cigarettes to her. She looked at me. I’d known for a long time that she smoked. I had never smoked in front of Grandmother, and even now I never smoked in front of my aunt. I lit her cigarette.
She puffed and exhaled the smoke. “Dad, I really love you, but I hope you didn’t bring me along to try to give me a lecture.”
When she had just started school, Martha had told her, “Girls must sit with their knees together.” Alenush had stamped the ground and said, “Mom, spare me the lecture!”
She had pronounced “lecture” as “letcure” and Martha and I laughed.
Martha asked, “Alenush, what does ‘letcure’ mean?”
Alenush tossed her braids over her shoulder and said, “It means like when Grandmother and Auntie Shakeh talk.”
Martha remonstrated, “Where are your manners?” and Alenush shrugged and left the room.
Alenush tapped her cigarette on the molded plastic ashtray. “What do you think of Behzad?”
The wind picked up the ash and blew it towards the statue of the angel that was in the middle of the pool.
On the cover of a book Behzad had brought me as a gift, there was a photo of a statue of an angel. Behzad said, “It’s from an excavation of the temple of Anahita.* Isn’t it beautiful?”
Martha said to me in Armenian, “It looks like the engraving on the altar in the St. Thaddeus Monastery.*”
Alenush translated for Behzad.
When I tried to pay for our tea, the café owner insisted that we must be his guests.
As we got back into the car, I said, “Of course you know that your mother and I have no problem with Behzad as a person.”
Alenush leaned over, put her hands on the steering wheel, and stared at me. “You don’t have a problem with him as a person! You just have a problem because of some medieval notions and traditions.”
Ever since she first met Behzad, she had become more articulate not only in Persian, but also in Armenian.
I eased her hand off the steering wheel and looked at the road. “Alenush, spare me the lecture,” I said.
We drove alongside the river, whose water was gray. I remembered it being other colors on other trips. Green and blue and brown. I wondered why its color should change every time. Once, on a trip to the North with my parents, Martha, and Alenush, the water had almost seemed orange.
My mother said, “It’s the color of the leaves reflected in the water.”
It had been fall then. That winter, Mother died, and Father the winter after.
The house seemed to have aged further since the last time we had visited. Wrinkled and faded, and older. The wooden rails on the upper balcony had collapsed here and there, the walls were cracked, and there was a musty smell everywhere. There was nowhere in the house that spiders hadn’t colonized with their webs.
; Alenush walked slowly through the house. “You can’t even tell where they are.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The spiders,” she answered.
In my mother’s room, she started to cry. “I wish you were still here,” she whispered. “You would understand.”
That night, we stayed in the town’s old hotel.
In my younger days the owner of the hotel was a fat, bald Armenian man whose name was Aghajan. When I was a child, I was afraid of the big mole on his cheek. The hotel had no more than seven or eight rooms, but it had a very large reception room. All the ceremonies in our Armenian community, from weddings, baptisms, and New Year celebrations to the end-of-school year parties and memorial services, were held in that room. When I was ten or twelve years old, one night I slept over at the hotel. Our house was being painted and my mother, who was allergic to the smell of paint, insisted that we spend the night at the hotel.
Grandmother raised her eyebrows. “I’ve never heard such nonsense. You’ll sleep at our house.”
My aunt snorted. “What ridiculous excuses! You can stay with us, too.”
My mother pressed her lips together, pushed her now short hair behind her ears, and stared at the ceiling.
Aghajan gave Mother and me the biggest room in the hotel, which had two brass beds, a carved wooden wardrobe and a mirror that covered half the wall. That night, my parents and I ate supper with Aghajan at a table next to the window looking out over the garden. Fenia was there, too. She was a blond Russian woman who always wore red lipstick and kissed the top of Aghajan’s bald head in front of everyone. That night Mother laughed the whole evening. I was happy because she was happy, and because we were staying in a hotel, and focused my attention on slicing a lamb kebab that was hard to cut.
A piece of the kebab had leaped off my plate twice already when finally Fenia took the chop and picked the meat off the bones with her plump white fingers, then handed it back to me, saying, “Why are you making it so hard for yourself? Eat it this way! Isn’t it easier?”
Aghajan chuckled. “That’s why I love her. She always takes life easy.”
My father laughed.
Mother laughed louder, and I remembered Grandmother and Auntie Shakeh talking about Aghajan and Fenia, saying, “They’ll answer for their sins in the next world.”
That night I lay awake in the bronze bed of the hotel room for a while, watching my own shadow in the mirror and making up a story. I was a prince who had battled with four monsters to save a blond, blue-eyed princess. The monsters were the four high posts on the bed. The next morning on the way back to our house, Mother wiped off her red lipstick with a handkerchief.
I sat with Alenush at a table next to the window. The only things that hadn’t changed from the old times were the orange trees in the garden. Here and there, the plaster ceiling of the reception room was falling down. The green velvet curtains were gone. The white cotton tablecloths were gone, too, and in their place were orange plastic ones.
I pointed to a corner of the room. “At New Year, they would put the Christmas tree over there.”
A piece of kebab popped off Alenush’s plate. She picked up the piece and put it in the ashtray. “Trees?” she asked absently. “Oh, right, they’re pretty.” And she looked out at the garden. Her profile reminded me of my mother.
We slept that night in two separate rooms. My room was small, with an iron bedstead and wardrobe. There was no mirror on the wall. I stayed awake for a while, thinking of my mother.
In my childhood, I had never thought twice about my mother having her own room, and I couldn’t understand why it bothered other people so much.
One day, Grandmother and Auntie Shakeh were sitting at our kitchen table, drinking coffee with my other aunt, who was visiting. My mother wasn’t home.
Auntie Shakeh said, “Everyone in town is talking about it.”
My mother’s sister said, “She’s never cared about what other people think, not even when she was a child. She’s always been stubborn. When we were kids, we hated meat stew. One day our father decreed that we had to eat it every day for lunch and dinner. My brother and I came around by the second day, but my sister went a whole week without eating until finally our father relented.”
She laughed. Auntie and Grandmother shook their heads.
I said, “So what, I have my own room, why does it matter?”
“Who told you to listen to the grown-ups when they’re talking?” my mother’s sister snapped.
Grandmother sighed. “A woman must obey her husband.”
Auntie Shakeh nodded.
Every time talk turned to my family, Alenush would say, “Your mother was the only open-minded person among you.”
Martha would remonstrate, “Alenush, manners!” and Alenush would just laugh, as she did whenever she’d gotten her mother’s goat.
I never understood why Grandmother loved Alenush more than all of her other grandchildren and their offspring. Every time we were due to visit Grandmother, Alenush would come up with a host of excuses not to go. Martha or I would say, “But your great-grandmother loves you so much,” and she would stamp her foot and say, “I can’t stand her house! Don’t you get it? There’s nothing to play with. You can’t touch anything. The curtains are all dark and heavy and the lights are dim. It’s depressing. Why don’t you understand?” We could only bring her around by promising to “only stay a short time and to visit Mamali’s house afterward.”
“Mamali” was my mother. As soon as Alenush saw Mamali she would rush to clasp her arms around her neck and kiss her, saying, “You smell so good! I love it here. It’s so full of light. It’s wonderful!”
At my mother’s house, Alenush had permission to play all of her odd games and was free to do anything she liked. The day she poured an expensive bottle of my mother’s perfume down the drain in the bathroom, Martha had wanted to punish her, but Mother just laughed so hard the tears rolled down her face. “How wonderful! Now for two or three weeks the bathroom will smell lovely.” Then, as Martha stared in amazement and I tried not to laugh, grandmother and granddaughter giggled together as though they’d die of amusement.
Another time Martha and I had left Alenush with my mother while we went to do some shopping, and when we got back, Alenush was sitting in the middle of the living room. On either side of her were two antique china vases, and she was ladling sugar from one to the other. My mother sat on an armchair, reading a book.
Martha yelled, “Nunush! What are you doing? You’ll break them.”
My mother closed her book. “Oh, let them break. They’re of no use to me.”
The vases were a gift from Grandmother, I couldn’t remember for which occasion.
Martha, either out of her own concern or because she was taken aback by Mother’s lack of concern, protested, “But the room is full of ants!”
Alenush clapped her hands together. “Hurray! Now we can have a tea party with the ants. Will you play, too?” She looked at my mother.
Mother bent over and inspected the line of ants that was carrying away the grains of sugar. Then she got up from her chair, sat cross-legged on the floor, and said, “The ants on this side are mine, the ones on that side are yours.”
Martha frowned all evening and wouldn’t speak to me because I had started laughing.
That night in the hotel room, I thought of Aghajan and Fenia, and wondered what kind of answer they’d gotten in the next world.
The next morning the beach was quiet, full of seashells and seaweed. We walked and talked. Mostly Alenush talked. I listened and thought about how carefully she chose her words. We sat down on the big rocks and tree trunks, and when it was my turn to talk, my words sounded bookish and repetitive to my own ears.
When I was a child, I would try to listen carefully to the priest in church. Sometimes when I didn’t understand a word he had used, I would ask Grandmother about it. Grandmother would say, “There is no need to understand every word the priest says. As long as we k
now that he never says anything untrue, and we think about God and Jesus when we are in church, that is enough.”
Alenush looked out at the sea, chin in hand. She took a cigarette out of my pack and lit it. On the way back, my hand was on my daughter’s shoulder.
On our last afternoon before we moved to Tehran for good, my mother and I went down to the beach. I was carrying a big bag full of all the seashells and stones that I had collected over the years.
The day before, Father had thrown a fit. “We’ll need a separate truck for all of your junk. Throw it out!”
Mother was walking a few steps ahead of me. She was crying.
I sat on a tree stump and emptied out the bag. I looked at the pile that had formed next to me, then at my mother, who was getting further and further away, then back at the pile on the sand. I picked up the stones one by one. I remembered when and where I had found each of them. This round one that looked like a pig’s snout, I had found the day my father took me boar-hunting.
Arsham and my uncle and father were spread out on top of a small hill and scouting around them. I was at the bottom of the hill with my back to them, staring at the ground. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears so that I would not hear the shots, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was this stone. For ten days my father showed everyone the stone and said, “This is what Edmond caught hunting!” and for the hundredth time I regretted showing my father something that I cared about.
The seashells were from the times when Tahereh, the school janitor’s daughter, and I had competed to see who could collect more. Tahereh got tired of the game fast. “There’s seashells from here to tomorrow. Come on, let’s try to find something there’s not so much of.”